Owing to developments of the information communication technologies, various categories of information can be obtained via networks such as the Internet, etc. On the other hand, information providers such as advertisers of articles and services, who want to distribute the information, became able to easily originate their own advertising information. For example, the following patent document 1 is known as a method of providing the advertising information on the Internet.
Further, such pieces of information, which contain images, dynamic images and sounds (voices) as the case may be in addition to characters, are effective representations of intentions of the originators. Accordingly, a browsing party became able to select various categories of information through a visual sense, an acoustic sense, etc., and able to thus gather necessary pieces of information.
Those pieces of information are represented as an HTML (HyperText Markup Language)-scripted Web page. The Web page can be linked via URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) to other Web pages without any restrictions. Therefore, the Web page has such a merit that related pieces of information can be flexibly combined. Conversely, however, the Web page do not yet provide a sufficient scheme for such a case that highly related pieces of information desired to be treated as a bundle of integrated information.
Particularly for an increase in data size required for representing those pieces of information, there is not a sufficient rise in communication capacity of the network. Accordingly, when the browsing party obtains the information, there occurs inconvenience due to an imbalance between the data size and the communication capacity.
For example, on the occasion of searching for information on a certain shop and for articles handled at this shop via a Web page on the Internet, the browsing party needs to access, at first, a top page of this shop and to display the entire top page.
Namely, in the case of obtaining the information from the Web page, the browsing party, to begin with, must wait for completion of downloading an HTML file that scripts the entire top page (equivalent to one page) linking to that Web page. Then, when the top page is displayed, the browsing party traces the link displayed on this page, thus moving to a next page. In this case also, the browsing party, before tracing a next link, must wait till the entire page is displayed.
Then, there is a case where it might take a time long enough not to be worth using to display the Web page including a large-capacity content such as images, etc. Further, there rises a communication cost for such displaying. Moreover, there is a case in which a terminal having a small memory capacity might be incapable of displaying such a Web page itself.
Further, this type of Web page is designed generally on the assumption of displaying on a personal computer including a VGA (Video Graphics Array)-based display device. Therefore, the general type of Web page is difficult to display on a terminal having only a small-screen display device such as an on-vehicle device for car navigation, a PDA (Personal Digital (Data) Assistant), a cellular phone, a PHS (Personal Handyphone System), etc.
For example, a process of describing in an electronic mail only URL of the Web page containing images, etc. having a large data size and delivering the mail to the information user, is conducted as a countermeasure.
For instance, a directory and a folder are known as a method of representing the information for dealing with related pieces of information in addition to the Web page described above. The directory and the folder are defined as a mechanism for storing the related information in a portion called a branch (or leaf) of a tree structure.
The directory and the folder are, however, insufficient in terms of a function of further distinguishing between pieces of information contained under one branch. For instance, when trying to extract the information contained under one branch, it follows that all pieces of information under this branch are captured irrespective of an intention of the user who operates.
Further, the directory and the folder do not provide a scheme for a function of maintaining, when extracting the information contained under one branch, relevancy to a high-order tree above this branch. For example, when the information contained in one single branch is copied to other areas, there vanishes a hierarchical relationship with the high-order information, which was established before copying.
Patent Document 1
Japanese Patent Application No. 2756483